The Will to Believe, Epistemic Virtue, and Holistic Transcendental Pragmatism

Abstract

This chapter seeks to interpret and evaluate William James’s pragmatism, especially his famous, or notorious, “will to believe” argument (James 1897), from the perspective of holistic pragmatism, along the lines formulated by Morton White (2002), a slightly neglected twentieth-century pragmatist. This approach to James involves a recognition of the virtue- and vice-epistemological dimension of the will to believe discussion. Christopher Hookway’s (e.g., 2011) work has been instrumental in bringing James’s will to believe idea into critical comparison with virtue epistemology. Another major pragmatism scholar, Peter Hare (2015), in turn once suggested that virtue epistemology could enrich or “thicken” holistic pragmatism. Therefore, we will get an enriched sense of how exactly the will to believe argument may be legitimately applied in the philosophy of religion (James’s original context) and (by extension) in other philosophical contexts by bringing holistic pragmatism and virtue-epistemological analysis together. In developing this proposal, the chapter engages with Hookway’s reading of James, in particular.